I would like to thank Joe Wisdom, Judith Linville, Jessica Lott, Coray Ames, Ryan Harper, and Mickey Gamble for their comments and suggestions on this article as it developed. I owe special thanks to Diana Hill and Alan Freeman, who have played indispensable roles in my southern gospel music education, and to Felicia Lawrence for being a living encyclopedia of information and history about the art and economies of Christian music and entertainment. Finally, I am grateful to the readers of averyfineline.com, who have loyally read and responded to all the first drafts of my many thoughts about gospel music and culture and in the process made possible a thriving online conversation about southern gospel that enriches my scholarship.

1. See, for instance, Fillingim, David, “A Flight from Liminality: ‘Home’ in Country and Gospel Music,” Studies in Popular Culture 20, no. 1 (1997): 75–82 Google Scholar; and Tucker, Stephen R., “Pentecostalism and Popular Culture in the South: A Study of Four Musicians,” Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 3 (1982): 68–80 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Guralnick, Peter, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1995), 77 Google Scholar.

3. Gaithernet.com, “Celebrating America's Musical Heritage—A Salute to Gospel Music,” http://gaither.com/news/news.php?uid=340 (accessed October 28, 2006).

4. GeorgeYounce.com, “George Younce Biography,” http://www.georgeyounceonline.com/biography.htm (accessed October 28, 2006).

5. Otghquartet.com, Schedule, http://www.otghquartet.com/index.cfm?PID=10933 (accessed October 28, 2006).

6. Cbn.com, “Grammy Nominated Crabb Family ‘Driven’ to Share Faith,” http://www.cbn.com/700club/guests/bios/crabbfamily_020305.aspx (accessed October 28, 2006).

7. Singingnews.com, “Mercy's Mark Scheduled to Appear on TBN,” October 4, 2005, http://www.singingnews.com/news/sg_wire/story_detail.lasso?id=35023 (accessed October 28, 2006).

8. Singingnews.com, “Greater Vision to Record Live Album,” August 9, 2001, http://www.singingnews.com/news/sg_wire/story_detail.lasso?id=32775 (accessed October 28, 2006).

9. Powell, Mark Allen, “There's Just Something About That Man,” Christianity Today, April 2004 Google Scholar, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/april/1.32.html (accessed October 28, 2006).

10. One main thrust of my argument here will be that the difficulty secular critics and others from outside the insular world of southern gospel have in understanding this music's cultural function is the product of a culture clash. But this is by no means the only factor contributing to the marginalization of white gospel as an object of scholarly study. To some extent, southern gospel's overlooked status is an effect of the way contemporary southern gospel commercial networks operate, and these operations are in turn a reflection of the way certain unique economic functions structure experience for gospel music consumers.

As large suburban mega-churches have become the center of evangelicalism in the popular American imagination, evangelicalism's much smaller, rural, and less aesthetically sophisticated congregations have receded from mainstream view even as these churches have increasingly become the place where the live concert, the base of southern gospel economy, takes place. These concerts go largely unnoticed outside the subculture of southern gospel not just because they possess a certain untranslatable quality but also because they are economically all but invisible. Instead of charging admission, the majority of southern gospel concerts collect a “free-will love offering,” during which audiences are asked to give whatever amount they feel “led by the Lord” to contribute. Free-will love offerings are central to the image of the southern gospel concert as a ministerial—rather than an economic—activity. But because it is not uncommon for free-will offerings barely to cover travel expenses for the artist (to say nothing about the cost of promoting and producing the concert), product sales before and after these concerts are the primary source of revenue for most southern gospel artists. These so-called table sales are one main method by which southern gospel consumers keep current with southern gospel music trends. But few groups report these table sales to the kinds of central accounting systems (such as SoundScan) whose data are important indicators to the wider world of a musical genre's significance. Thus, tables sales and free-will love offerings effectively mask any reliable measure of the southern gospel economy.

Economic invisibility is also true for larger concerts that charge admission. Ticket sales to the kind of event that Goff describes at the beginning of his “Rise of Southern Gospel Music”—a vast outdoor singing in rural North Carolina that attracted more than 6,000 people— rarely if ever are reported to any accounting agency as would be standard practice in secular musical genres and many other genres of Christian entertainment. So even though small-church concerts are the engine driving the southern gospel economy and even though some of the larger southern gospel concerts rival many secular musical events in size and scope, there is no systematic way to register these events’ scale or economic impact (the Bill Gaither Homecoming Friends tour and merchandising is an exception to this general rule). Similarly, radio remains an essential segment of the southern gospel economic infrastructure. But stations that play southern gospel tend to transmit on comparatively lowwattage signals and to be owned by individuals, families, or local religious organizations who see these stations not primarily as financial concerns but as a form of ministerial outreach. Except at a small group of stations with corporate affiliation, airplay of southern gospel music is not tracked by any reliable reporting system (such as Broadcast Data Systems). Indeed, save for retail sales of products that pass through recording companies’ distribution channels, the southern gospel industry could fairly be described as a loosely affiliated network of small-businesses (event promotion, radio, concert production, artist entrepreneurs) whose links remain minimally articulated and informally maintained.

This tendency for the southern gospel economy to efface and informalize its own economic operations to a great extent reflects the constant tension in the Christian music world between “ministry” and “entertainment.” In the case of southern gospel, the evangelical emphasis on Christian separateness from the world at large makes this tension especially intense. And this tension, I would argue, accounts for the development of economic structures—free-will offerings, informal “table sales,” self-effacing ticket sales—that seek to minimize the profit motive as secondary or inconsequential while encouraging audiences to see their financial investments in the music as participation in an entertaining form of Christian evangelism.

11. Goff, James, “The Rise of Southern Gospel Music,” Church History 67 (December 1998): 723 Google Scholar.

12. Graves, Michael P. and Fillingim, David, eds., More than Precious Memories (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2004). 13 Google Scholar. Ibid., 5.

14. Gavin James Campbell, review of More than Precious Memories, ed. Graves, Michael and Fillingim, David, Journal of Southern History 72, no. 1 (February 2006): 217 Google Scholar.

15. David Fillingim, “Oft Made to Wonder: Southern Gospel as Musical Theodicy,” in More than Precious Memories, ed. Graves and Fillingim, 49. Janice L. Rushing suggests a similar approach to gospel music in “Gospel Music Rhetoric,” Religious Communication Today 1, no. 1 (1978): 29–35.

16. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 10 Google Scholar.

17. R. W. Apple, “On the Road: Polishing Nashville's Twang,” New York Times, July 28, 2000, E27.

18. See, for instance, Rossing, Barbara, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (Boulder: Westview Press, 2004 Google Scholar). The first sentence of the book captures Rossing's dismissive attitude toward the evangelical culture her study addresses: “The rapture is a racket.”

19. Goff, James, Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 4 Google Scholar.

20. How to define southern gospel music is a longstanding subject of debate within the industry and among historians of the music. Don Cusic's definition is perhaps the most quotable. Southern gospel, he writes, is “music whose sound is akin to country music” and “dominated by groups singing the traditional four part harmonies, and is, in reality, more national than Southern, although it remains strongest in the south where it developed” (Don Cusic, The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel Music [Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990], 95). Goff prefers to define gospel by its development, stressing the evolutionary stages of the music from nineteenth-century revivalism and shape-note singing, into the increasing professionalization of the music and industry in the early to mid-twentieth century, through its established position in Christian entertainment (Goff, Close Harmony). Historically, white gospel music emerged from within early twentiethcentury Christian music publishing—quartets of male singers, who traveled a performance circuit primarily in the rural South promoting songbooks of new gospel music, eventually split off from their publisherpatrons and established themselves in their own right as entertainers and ministers (see Charles Wolfe, “‘Gospel Boogie’: White Southern Gospel Music in Transition, 1945–55,” Popular Music 1 [1981]: 73–82). Traditionalists within southern gospel music point to the centrality of the male quartet as the mark of true southern gospel music to this day (Jerry Kirksey, “Watering Down the Message, It's Not Gospel,” Singing News 26 [1995]: 10), even though male quartets are by no means more common than other nontraditional group formations. According to purists, the defining feature of southern gospel is homogeneity in sound, marked by close male harmony echoing the folk and family singing sensibility of the south; homogeneity in the music's concern for what Goff has called “theologically correct lyrics”; and homogeneity of character—that is, “for performers,” as Goff also notes, “who maintain some semblance of a Christian [one might add conservative fundamentalist Christian] lifestyle” (Goff, Close Harmony, 4).

The trouble with this definition is that it fails to account for the astonishing heterogeneity of southern gospel music in its current form. Today, there are at least as many mixed-gender quartets on the road as all-male foursomes; trios and duos—male, female, and gender-mixed— rival quartets as the dominant group formation. And the stylistic variety within these is just as diverse as their composition. If, as Charles Wolfe argues, gospel music was in the early twentieth century “the fourth great genre of grass roots music” alongside jazz, blues, and country music, today southern gospel has quite consciously adapted, reappropriated, and co-opted different aspects of those forms (and others) (Wolfe, “‘Gospel Boogie,’” 73). Contemporary southern gospel music easily encompasses groups from the Martins, a brother and two sisters who sound like a cross between Manhattan Transfer and Take Six from the south, or the Isaacs Family, which calls itself a bluegrass group but sings a kind of countrified pop with folk-music instrumentation, to the maletrio Greater Vision, a group that represents the solid center of southern gospel and yet regularly inflects its arrangements with elements of country music, contemporary Christian music, praise and worship singing, and choral music. And this says nothing of the numerous soloists and a handful of duos traveling the southern gospel circuit today. Placed alongside the core of traditionalist male quartets, these others groups and individuals create a constellation of hybridized white gospel sounds at times so disparate as to defy all but the most uselessly general or vague stylistic definitions.

Another way to say this is that paradox is a defining feature of southern gospel. Take the question of gender. According to readership demographics from the Singing News magazine, southern gospel culture is almost evenly divided between men and women: 48 percent men, 52 percent women (“The Singing News Media Kit,” Singing News [2006], 1). And the popularity of several female performers in southern gospel easily rivals and in some cases surpasses that of their male counterparts (for example, Libbi Perry Stuffle, Kim Greene Hopper, Sherry Lewis Easter, Peg McKamey Beane, and Connie Hopper are regularly recognized as fan favorites at the Singing News Fan Awards show held annually at the National Quartet Convention). These facts can be difficult for outsiders to reconcile with the paternalistic tendencies of the evangelical tradition from which southern gospel emerges and of which it remains a part (there are, for instance, no women on the National Quartet Convention's board of directors).

The insistence on the centrality of the male quartet in an industry replete with mixed-gender groups, trios, duos, and soloists and a paternalistic culture statistically dominated by women—how, one might ask, are we to make sense of these defining paradoxes embedded in southern gospel? Part of the answer has to do with the close link in southern gospel between the music and the fans’ and singers’ own beliefs and values. One key feature of southern gospel music and culture is the way it publicly seeks socioreligious consensus while allowing—even encouraging—the private cultivation of theologically, psychospiritually, and ideologically idiosyncratic points of view.

For now, it is sufficient to note that what holds southern gospel together, what defines it, is not a single identifiable sound but self-selection: people who choose to associate themselves—as fans or performers or other industry professionals—with the music and its culture. In other words, southern gospel is a network of interrelated musical styles connected by performers’ (and fans’) self-identification with the southern gospel musical and religious tradition. Such a definition acknowledges the practical reality of the music in its current form: while there is a stylistic core to southern gospel, slavishly replicating it is not at all a prerequisite for being part of contemporary southern gospel music.

21. For Left Behind, see Amy Johnson Frykholm, Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (Oxford University Press, 2004); for Falwell, see Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

22. “This World Is Not My Home,” Homecoming Souvenir Songbook (Alexandria: Gaither Music Co., 1993), 2.

23. Goff, “Rise of Southern Gospel Music,” 726.

24. Fillingim, “Flight from Liminality,” 80.

25. Geertz, , Interpretation of Cultures, 11 Google Scholar.

26. Goff, , Close Harmony, 274 Google Scholar.

27. Ibid., 4.

28. For more on white gospel music's retreat from mainstream Christian entertainment in the 1970s and 1980s (as a reaction against the move toward a more theologically progressive and socially liberalized Christianity represented by the rise of contemporary Christian music), see Goff, Close Harmony, 273–74.

29. Ibid., 7.

30. Werner, Craig, Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 165 Google Scholar.

31. Ibid., xvii.

32. Crouch, Andrae, “Can't Nobody,” in The Best of Andrae Crouch (Nashville: Hal Leonard), 6–8 Google Scholar.

33. Werner, , Playing the Changes, 165 Google Scholar.

34. Werner sees important psychosocial and aesthetic implications in this style: “the continual testing of artistic perception against audience response, immersed in the flow of time” is part of a larger movement toward the cultivation of artistic by-play and polyphonic discourse in Afro-modernism that he has called “the gospel impulse” ( Werner, , Playing the Changes, 165 Google Scholar). Werner's analysis relies on a subtle theory of ritual and performance in religious and vernacular arts that suggests related lines of inquiry in southern gospel. Specifically, individual and collective narratives modeled by southern gospel performances seem both to bear out and complicate Werner's notion of a single “gospel” impulse and instead point toward the possibility of a continuum of aesthetic and semiotic systems emerging from within the variegated cultural contexts that support different styles of gospel music.

35. “The Singing News Media Kit,” 1; Linder, Eileen, ed., Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (New York: National Council of Churches, 2005 Google Scholar). I am grateful to Danny Jones, Jerry Kirksey, and Pam Slaney of the Singing News for providing southern gospel demographic information.

36. Quoted in Montel, William Lynwood, Singing the Glory Down: Amateur Gospel Music in Southern Central Kentucky, 1900–1990 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 2 Google Scholar.

37. Ayers, Edward, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press), 397 Google Scholar–98.

40. Montel, , Singing the Glory Down, 4 Google Scholar.

41. Quoted in Crawford, David, “Gospel Songs in Court: From Rural Music to Urban Industry in the 1950s,” Journal of Popular Culture 11 (Winter 1977): 555.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On hymns, see Noll, Mark and Blumhofer, Edith, eds., Sing Them Over Again to Me: Hymns and Hymnbooks in America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006 Google Scholar).

42. “Brethren, We Have Met to Worship,” in The Baptist Hymnal (Nashville: Baptist Press, 1975), 260.

43. “Looking for a City,” in The American Country Hymn Book: 100 Gospel Greats Old and New (Waco, Tex.: Canaanland Music, 1975), 108–9.

44. Quoted in Crawford, “Gospel Songs in Court,” 555.

45. Montel, , Singing the Glory Down, 4 Google Scholar.

46. In some cases, lyrics can be quite theologically specific. For example, a song by the Ruppes, a family trio from Georgia, quite specifically advances a premillennial dispensationalist view of eschatology, making reference to those whom God “did predestinate” for salvation (James Michael Sage, lyricist, “Redemption Complete,” The Ruppes, Seasons, Spring Hill, 1997). But, in general, this kind of theological specificity is the exception.

47. Brumley, Albert E., lyricist, “I’ll Fly Away,” in The American Country Hymn Book: 100 Gospel Greats Old & New, 9 Google Scholar.

48. Cusic, The Sound of Light.

49. Tichi, Cecilia, High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), ix Google Scholar.

50. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, American literature was the primary medium in which evangelicalism (re)negotiated questions of Christian conduct and reimagined the relevance of Christian theology in response to sociocultural change. Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing (1859) stands as one of the last great works of American fiction about living evangelical Christianity written by a self-identified evangelical. The Civil War marked a historical divide in the American mind and its artistic world. As Henry James put it in 1879, America had, in the war, “eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil” ( James, Henry, Hawthorne [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1901], 140 Google Scholar). The subject of postwar American literature was thenceforth to be not man (or woman) and God (Stowe's preferred dramatic dyad) but man and woman in society. Even when the fin de siècle realists and naturalists who took up this task with great gusto explored questions of religion, they did so as outsiders, analysts, ironists, satirists, and literary psychologists. None of them spoke with (because none had) the experiential authority of a religious insider that Stowe possessed as a birthright and continued to claim in adulthood. Having successfully challenged the supremacy of Calvinism's rigid, authoritarian, masculinist God and supplanted him with a “new authority,” as Susan Harris describes the achievement of The Minister's Wooing, one “intuited rather than learned, premised on love rather than logic, achieved through community rather than isolation,” Stowe's fiction effectively gave the American literary imagination a license to look elsewhere for material ( Harris, Susan, “Introduction,” The Minister's Wooing [New York: Penguin, 1999]: xii Google Scholar). In its modern flight from engagements with evangelical affectcentric culture, American literature largely surrendered its prerogatives to represent and grapple with post-Calvinist evangelicalism from within, as Stowe had. And in the space created by that surrender, the roots of what would become southern gospel music began to emerge in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rural religious communities that started cultivating new vernacular traditions in which to express and explore the kinds of feelings and experiences previously addressed by sentimental religious fiction. One of those new forms of expression was a folk-gospel tradition of “all-day” recreational “sings.” Ted Ownby describes these as they developed in the 1880s: “Small groups met at church or in private homes to sing hymns for two or three hours on selected Sundays, and once a year each church hosted a large event for young people from throughout the area” ( Ownby, Ted, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990], 141 Google Scholar). This tradition was important not least of all because it performed the cultural function in much of evangelicalism once fulfilled by more traditional textual modes like the sermon and literary forms such as the sentimental novel Stowe preferred: namely, attempting to reconcile orthodox doctrines with unorthodox experience and its attendant feelings. By the 1920s, when professional southern gospel was developing, this rural singing tradition had crystallized into evangelicalism's most expressively rich vernacular artistic structure.

51. “Till the Storm Passes By,” in Homecoming Souvenir Songbook, 108.

52. Tindley, Charles A., lyricist, “We’ll Understand It Better By and By,” in Homecoming Souvenir Songbook, vol. 2 (Alexandria, Ind.: Gaither Music Co., 1994), 154–55.Google Scholar

54. Broadly defined, southern gospel songs fall into three general groups: songs of celebration (including novelty songs like the enormously popular Kingsmen hit from the 1980s, “Excuses,” but also more commonplace toe-tappers—upbeat, feel-good songs meant to entertain within the Christian context of praise to God); songs of supplication (any invocation of God's power, help, comfort, or forgiveness); and songs of surrender (lyrical statements of unworthiness, unmerited favor, or resolutions to abandon the self to God's mercy and direction). Needless to say, any given song can easily cross the permeable borders between these categories.

55. Quartet, Cathedral, “Oh What a Savior,” Alive: Deep in the Heart of Texas, Homeland, 2000 Google Scholar.

56. McManus, Robert, “Southern Gospel Music vs Contemporary Christian Music: Competing for the Soul of Evangelicalism,” in More than Precious Memories, ed. Graves, and Fillingim, , 73 Google Scholar.

57. Dartt, Tracy G., lyricist, “God on the Mountain,” The McKameys, Gone To Meetin’, Morning Star, 1989 Google Scholar. Reprinted by permission of Gaviota Music Group, a division of Manna Music Company, Pacific City, Oreg. My thanks to Judy Nelon for her assistance in securing this permission. I am also grateful to Greg Bentley at Crossroads Music for his generosity in helping me navigate the internecine world of rights management, licensing, and reprint permissions.

58. Rushing, “Gospel Music Rhetoric,” 29.

59. Rowland, “Oh That Wonderful Promise.”

60. Richards, I. A., Practical Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 254–74Google Scholar.

61. Milder, Robert, Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 83 Google Scholar.

62. “Till the Storm Passes By,” in Homecoming Souvenir Songbook, 108.

63. Moody, Ruby, lyricist, “Plan of Salvation,” Cathedral Quarter, Master Builder, Riversong, 1995 Google Scholar.

64. Lindsey, Joel, lyricist, “Calvary Answers for Me,” The Perrys, This is the Day, Daywind, 2003 Google Scholar.

65. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. von Frank, Albert J., 4 vols. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989–92), 2:194 Google Scholar.

66. Dickinson, Emily. “In Many and Reportless Places,” in Complete Poems of Emily Dickson, ed. Johnson, Thomas (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 593–94Google Scholar.

67. Tucker, “Pentecostalism and Popular Culture,” 68.

68. Crabb, Gerald, lyricist, “Through the Fire,” The Crabb Family, Driven, Daywind, 2004 Google Scholar. Lyrics reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Publishing, Milwaukee, Wis.

69. Fillingim, “Oft Made to Wonder,” 54.

70. Geertz, , Interpretation of Cultures, 31 Google Scholar.

71. Steele, Jeff, lyricist, “We Want America Back,” The Steeles, We Want America Back, Daywind, 1996 Google Scholar. Reprinted with permission of Christian Taylor Music, a division of Daywind Publishing, Nashville, Tenn.

72. Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), xviii Google Scholar.

73. The emotional belief I describe above and its emphasis on consecrating faith by religious affect is particularly vulnerable to the manipulations of artful rhetoric, the seductions of good showmanship, and political self-delusion. In southern gospel, this is especially true of songs that treat political themes. The performance of politically and ideologically right-wing songs relies on emotional belief to perpetuate the myth of a persecuted Christian majority. A song such as the antigovernment ditty Apple heard in Nashville—a song that warns “we must return to the values we left before the country we love is totally lost” works by encouraging audiences to convince themselves emotionally, in the experience of the song's recitation of anti-Christian bias in the world, that evangelicals suffer real pain through purely symbolic actions (The Steeles, “We Want America Back”). Courts banning the display of the Ten Commandments in government buildings or prohibiting formally sanctioned prayer in public schools are two common points of focus in white gospel music of a political nature, as are same-sex marriage and abortion. To point out that conservatives and, in many cases, conservative Christians enjoy a great deal of access and power in government, culture, and society at all levels is both to miss and make the point simultaneously. The song's mispresentation of sociopolitical reality (gay marriage, for instance, is legal in only one state, while more than two dozen states have laws explicitly forbidding such unions) speaks to the volatility of evangelical identity and its reliance on narratives of conflict, crisis, and persecution—narratives rhetorically constructed and psychosocially maintained through the kind of cultural exchanges embodied in southern gospel music.

74. Geertz, , Interpretation of Cultures, 10 Google Scholar.

75. Keeler, J. D., “Why Do They Love Southern Gospel Music? An Audience Study of the Bill Gaither Nostalgic Concert Video Series,” in More Than Precious Memories, ed. Graves, and Fillingim, , 201–34Google Scholar.

74. Geertz, , Interpretation of Cultures, 10 Google Scholar.

75. Keeler, J. D., “Why Do They Love Southern Gospel Music? An Audience Study of the Bill Gaither Nostalgic Concert Video Series,” in More Than Precious Memories, ed. Graves, and Fillingim, , 201–34Google Scholar.